Chapter 10: The Last Royal Broadcast

The Kingdom of Palm Beachonia

Chapter 10: The Last Royal Broadcast

By the time the King prepared to address his people one final time, Palm Beachonia was already mostly dark.

The Wall, once a glittering crown around the kingdom, had begun to crumble.
The golden paint peeled in great strips, flapping like dead flags in the salt-heavy air.
Monster trucks sat abandoned in the streets, their once-proud banners drooping like wilted flowers.
The Freedom Markets were empty, save for puddles of rainwater and scattered pamphlets still proclaiming:

"Victory is Here - Eat More Freedom Jerky!"

RoyalNet, once the lifeblood of national delusion, sputtered along at a fraction of its former glory.
Blackouts roamed from sector to sector.
Screens flickered.
Signal strength was measured in vague approximations:
"Mostly working," "Kind of working," and "Sadness detected."

In the Royal Keep - where damp had begun seeping up the marble floors and the power flickered every few minutes - King Donald the First summoned his remaining court for one final broadcast.

---

The Preparation

RoyalNet technicians, those who hadn't defected to become junior Truck Lords, jury-rigged a makeshift studio in the grand dining hall.

The Royal Throne had been moved onto a slightly listing platform made of shipping pallets.
Behind it, a backdrop depicting an idealized Palm Beachonia - endless palm trees, shining skyscrapers, smiling citizens holding loyalty cards high - fluttered each time the ventilation wheezed.

The King himself, draped in a crimson bathrobe and a Burger King crown now permanently duct-taped for stability, practiced his victory gestures in front of a cracked mirror.

• A thumbs-up for prosperity.

• A double-thumbs-up for loyalty.

• An emphatic golf clap for greatness.

When the camera light flickered red, he leaned forward, smiling the sad, bloated smile of a man selling beachfront property on a sinking island.

---

The Speech

"My fellow Palm Beachonians," he began, voice thick with the dust of abandoned dreams, "what a journey it’s been."

He paused dramatically, letting the emptiness of the hall echo around him.

"We have built the greatest nation in the history of nations.
People are saying it. Everybody’s saying it.
Even the people who left—they’re saying it from outside the Wall because they’re jealous. Very jealous. Very sad."

The camera wobbled slightly as the technician tried to swat a mosquito.

"We have achieved historic loyalty.
Our Loyalty Scores were the highest. Ever.
Better than Rome. Better than Camelot. Better than... whatever those people in Lord of the Rings had."

A crash echoed in the distance—likely another abandoned truck collapsing into a pothole—but the King pressed on.

"And now…"
"Now we prepare for our greatest victory yet.
The whole world will see.
The whole world will come to Palm Beachonia to marvel at what we’ve done.
Tremendous wall. Tremendous trucks. Tremendous tremendousness."

There was a long silence.
No applause.
No cheering.

Only the low, irregular hum of a dying generator and the occasional creak of the crumbling Royal Keep.

"So stay strong, Patriots. Stay loyal.
Wave those flags. Drive those trucks.
The best days are just ahead.
Nobody’s ever seen anything like what’s coming in about two weeks. Nobody."

He gave a shaky thumbs-up.
Then, forgetting he was still live, he turned slightly and muttered:

"Get me a cheeseburger. And a Diet Coke. Make it fast, the lights are—"

And then, fittingly,
the screen went black.

---

The Aftermath

The Last Royal Broadcast lasted three minutes and forty-eight seconds.
It was replayed in loops for the next several hours on RoyalNet, which glitched increasingly between reruns of monster truck battles, Freedom Rodeo commercials, and static.

By morning, RoyalNet was gone entirely.

The last flickering broadcast cut off mid-sentence, mid-gesture - King Donald’s frozen thumbs-up pixelated into an unrecognizable blur.

Outside the Royal Keep, the once-proud monster trucks sat rusting under a gray, indifferent sky.

Inside the Wall, only the stubborn and the mad remained.

The citizens of Palm Beachonia, if they could still be called that, began making their plans:
to tunnel out, to raft out, to simply walk until the Wall gave up pretending to be a wall.

The King, meanwhile, was already gone.

Rumors spread that he had slipped away in the dead of night, disguised as a visiting Swiss golf pro, muttering about "greater kingdoms" and "better sand dunes" somewhere across the sea.

Nobody knew for sure.

Nobody much cared.

The golden age of Palm Beachonia had ended not with a bang, but with a low, sputtering cough and the unmistakable smell of something electrical catching fire.